Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Tuesday, December 5, 2000
Jones to put You get the feeling after the next two months roll into a third season for University of Hawaii football head coach June Jones, you won't find him unwinding in front of a VCR.
football on pause
in off-season
After a tough 3-9 year,
the Warriors' head coach will
regroup away from the fieldBy Paul Arnett
Star-BulletinThe past 70-something months of his life have been on fast forward. From head coach for the Atlanta Falcons in 1994 through yesterday's final news conference of 2000 for the Warriors, Jones has lived on cat time -- nine lives leading into one.
But if the head coach for the Warriors is true to his word -- habits check out, but rarely leave -- Jones will spend time away from his pet project and recharge the batteries asked to perform from dawn to dusk for far too long.
"I'm going to enjoy this off-season," Jones said. "I'm going to take some time away from some of the things I do, and do some things I want to do. It seems like since '94, you know, real long hours. I need to do that (spend time away with family and friends)."
After the news conference, Jones learned that former Oregon teammate Norv Turner had been fired by the Washington Redskins. He had seen Turner's shaky interview after Sunday's loss to the New York Giants, something you might think he's happy to have left behind. But you'd be wrong.
"That's the way it is in the NFL," Jones said. "That didn't bother me."
It's that kind of mental focus that will allow Jones to shake off this disappointing season like a bad nightmare the following day and return in the spring fit for duty. Sometimes, like in the game of Frogger, you have to go sideways to win.
"I think this season as a coach, as I look back a year from now, this will be the best coaching job that we did as a staff and I feel like I did," Jones said. "The way everybody hung together. I've been places and have seen how other things happen, you just turn on the TV right now and look what's going on at other places.
"The way we've stayed together. The way we've played hard. The way they listened. The way they tried to do what we asked them to do. There was no give up, no quit, no finger-pointing, no nothing. Anybody, like I said, can coach when it's 9-4.
"But it's hard to coach when you're 3-9 and still have the strength that our locker room had. If I was never to coach again I'd feel like I did my job."
It's true, the H-men didn't live up to the hype built by the coaches and the media, but there were lessons learned that should carry over quite nicely into the spring and fall of 2001. New Alabama head coach Dennis Franchione once said after TCU upended USC in the 1998 Sun Bowl that his team would have to learn how to live with winning.
"When a team that has struggled to win (Franchione inherited a 1-10 program at TCU), suddenly has success, they have to learn what that's all about," Franchione said. "Sometimes, that first year leads to a setback the next season, especially if a team doesn't learn what it means to win."
That lesson was learned the hard way by this year's team that was coming off the greatest turnaround in NCAA history. There was a lot of talk in fall camp about shocking the world, back-to-back postseason appearances and maybe even a top 25 finish along the way.
Not that there's anything wrong with building that kind of belief system from within. But how this team, minus nearly two-dozen seniors, blends with recruiting class No. 3 is the real testament as to whether the Warriors will be Western Athletic Conference contenders.
Jones is optimistic Hawaii will battle for the crown the Warriors shared with Fresno State and TCU a year ago. Last year's win over Oregon State, a team that's playing Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl next month, is proof the offensive and defensive systems work with the right combination of players on the field.
On the bright side, freshman quarterback Tim Chang and his offensive front matured into a workable unit. Chang was sacked just 10 times en route to becoming only the second true freshman to breech 3,000 passing yards in a season. On the dark side, his wideouts weren't as accommodating. Too many dropped passes and suspect reads led to problems right through last Saturday's loss to Nevada-Las Vegas.
The defense was a bust. Injuries contributed greatly to this problem, especially up front, but the linebacker corps didn't perform as well as last year's threesome. Instead of Jeff Ulbrich and Yaphet Warren leading the team in tackles, it was safeties Jacob Espiau and Nate Jackson who were the ministers of defense. Too often, they cheated toward the run, which forced UH's corners to be in too many one-on-one situations against too many talented wideouts.
Transfers and recruiting will be the keys to solving these defensive woes.
"It's frustrating because we lost many games we had chances to win," Jones said. "The positives are, we played a lot of young players who got a lot of valuable experience. I think we learned a lot about how to get through the tough times, which will pay off for us in the next couple of years.
"We're recruiting athletes. We have to do well again this year in recruiting. We've got our eye on defense and offense, just the same as normal. We've got to get better, so hopefully, we'll have success again this season recruiting and I think we will."
http://uhathletics.hawaii.edu
